Describing the Difference Research Has Made to the World

Here is an interesting new blog post by Heather Piwowar about the different ways research can impact the world and the importance of telling them apart. Good food for thought as we think about ways to help researchers analyze how people are reading, bookmarking, sharing, discussing, and citing research online.

I think Anirvan made a great point to think about ways how we can integrate “altmetrics” data with UCSF Profiles. Some of the metrics mentioned below may be a great starting point.

Here’s what Heather writes:

Figuring out the flavors of science impact. CC-BY-NC by maniacyak on flickr

We have clustered all PLoS ONE papers published before 2010 using five metrics that are fairly distinct from one another: HTML article page views, number of Mendeley reader bookmarks, Faculty of 1000 score, Web of Science citation counts as of 2011, and a combo count of twitter, Facebook, delicious, and blog discussion.

We normalized the metrics to account for differences due to publication date and service popularity, transformed them, and standardized to a common scale. We tried lots of cluster possibilities; it seems that five clusters fit this particular sample the best.

Here is a taste of the clusters we found.  Bright blue in the figure below means that the metric has high values in that cluster, dark grey means the metric doesn’t have much activity.  For example, papers in “flavour E” in the first column have fairly low scores on all five metrics, whereas papers in “flavour C” on the far right have a lot of HTML page views and Sharing (blog posts, tweeting, facebook clicking, etc) activity. View image and read on

Further reading:

• Manuscript, ‘Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact’, by Jason Priem and Brad Hemminger 
• Recent post: Measuring total scholarly impact, beyond the cite